Former Trump surgeon general struggling to get career back on track due to 'Trump Effect'

In an interview with the Washington Post, one of Donald Trump's former Surgeons General expressed frustration with the path his career has taken due to his ties to the former president that took place during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

As the report notes, Dr. Jerome Adams and his wife have pinned his struggles to find a landing spot commensurate with his experience on what they call they call the "Trump Effect" which is not abating now that the former president has launched a third run for the presidency.

According to the report, "It followed them from Washington to their home in the Indianapolis suburbs. They felt it when he was exploring jobs in academia, where he would receive polite rejections from university officials who worried that someone who served in the administration of the the former president would be badly received by their left-leaning student bodies. They felt it when corporations decided he was too tainted to employ."

In an interview, he explained that Trump is “a force that really does take the air out of the room,” before adding, "The Trump hangover is still impacting me in significant ways.”

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As the Post's Manuel Roig-Franzia wrote, "The former surgeon general’s predicament underscores one of the givens of today’s political environment: Association with Trump becomes a permanent tarnish, a kind of reverse Midas touch. Whether indicted or shunned or marginalized, a cavalcade of former Trump World figures have foundered in the aftermath of one of the more chaotic presidencies in modern American history."

Saying he is not complaining, Adams stated, "People still are afraid to touch anything that is associated with Trump."

The Post report adds that Adams did finally land a spot in September 2021, when "Purdue University President Mitch Daniels,a former Indiana governor and Republican stalwart, hired Adams as the first executive director of health equity initiatives at the school."

However, as Roig-Franzia notes, the spectre of association with Trump still haunts the doctor.

"Even as Adams was seeking to define the next chapter of his life, he was engaged in an almost constant battle on social media. His frequent tweets about everything from his personal life to public health issues have invariably drawn attacks from both the right and the left. Rather than ignore his critics, he has often punched back, engaging in Twitter spats that stretch for days," the journalist wrote.